Animal of the week|Learning about money made the monkeys fall into gambling and prostitution.
The summary is made by artificial intelligence and checked by a human.
An experiment at Yale showed that monkeys understand the concept of money and know how to trade.
The monkeys hoarded cheap food and gambled.
One monkey committed a bank robbery and later paid another monkey for sex in exchange for a token.
Economy balancing is difficult. There is debt and interest, deficit and inflation. Even a monkey still understands the basics. If you don’t have money, you can’t buy anything.
Monkeys are actually pretty good with money, he taught a famous experiment done at Yale twenty years ago. Researchers taught capuchin monkeys what money is and how to trade.
Capuchin monkeys are small tailed monkeys living in Central America. They are driven forward in life mainly by food and sex, like quite a few people.
The monkeys were given metal tokens with which they could buy food from the researchers. The monkey could choose whether he wanted a grape or a jelly cube with his money. Every day the monkey got 12 tokens.
If both treats cost the same, the monkey bought the one he liked the most.
But then the researchers changed the prices. For example, one day I got two jelly for the price of one. The monkeys hoarded it, even though they preferred grapes. Apina immediately internalized the lesson of Sulo Vilen from the TV series “Tankki rinneen”: you should buy when you can get it cheap.
Then the monkeys started gambling. When the monkey had to choose whether to buy two grapes for sure or take the risk of getting three grapes but with bad luck only one, the monkey played with risk.
Most people do the same, even if it makes more sense to play it safe.
Once a monkey did a bank robbery: it stole the entire box of tokens, ran to the common room of the monkeys and threw the tokens into the open cage. The researchers now in turn had to “buy” Polet back from the monkeys by giving them food.
The monkeys could not normally give tokens to each other. Now that the Polets were scattered, a monkey seized the opportunity. It took the token, went to mate with another monkey, and paid him a token as compensation. The latter monkey, with the token he earned, immediately went to the researchers to buy food.
So the monkey bought sex as soon as he learned how money works.